In the past few decades, there has been a dramatic increase in the amount of digital information being generated and stored. This accumulation has taken place at an explosive rate. The sheer volume of information available over the World Wide Web and corporate networks continues to accelerate. Broadcast organizations, advertising agencies, consumer products and services companies, and other businesses have demanding media asset management needs. Since media assets are very crucial to these organizations, they have a need for an efficient way to catalog, browse, search and manage their media assets.
A digital asset management (DAM) system customized around a particular domain or business area allows an organization to efficiently and accurately capture knowledge about, manage and exploit their enormous stores of data. Digital asset management has been broadly identified as the technologies involved with creating, acquiring, managing, storing and retrieving digital assets.
As a subset to this technology, media asset management (MAM) can be further characterized as an advanced set of tools that enable media-rich organizations the ability to manage time-based content, such as audio and video, in addition to other items of value, such as imagery, office documents and text. The two key benefits associated to this class of technology are asset and value. An asset, i.e., stored data, has little intrinsic value if it cannot be located in a timely manner or at all. The value of an asset can only be realized if it can be efficiently and accurately identified, stored, retrieved and reused.
One approach for a media asset management system is offered by the current assignee of the present invention, and is known as the Invenio™ media asset management system. The Invenio™ media asset management system streamlines the ingest process of digitally recording media into a required format, and creating meaningful metadata, i.e., encapsulated “information about information” that is essential for future usability. An intelligent archiving links digitally recorded media to a search engine so that it can be later located and retrieved. In addition, video segments can be marked using a keyword list and synonyms that link similar content for deeper links and associations.
Another media asset management system is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,567,980 to Jain et al. Video segments are cataloged according to predefined or user definable metadata. The metadata is used to index and then retrieve encoded video segments. Video metadata track processors convert metadata tracks of video information to produce displayable frames containing hyperlinks between displayable data. Stored video information may be browsed, and hyperlinked frames of metadata track representations are displayed for selection.
An integrated information processing system for geospatial media is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,681,231 Burnett, in which visual, audio, textual and geospatial data is processed. A geospatial media recorder places geospatial data on each frame of the video segment. A geographic information system for managing and coordinating collected aerial imagery is disclosed in U.S. patent application No. 2004/0008866 to Rhoads et al. Digital watermarks are used to convey information that is used to register or align geographic images with a corresponding image location.
Despite the different types of media asset management systems available, surveillance organizations in particular have a challenging problem of managing their video segments. This is particularly so when an aerial sensor platform is used to monitor a large geographical area for an extended period of time. The large volume of temporal and location based media that is generated compounds the problem.